Out in space there is to be seen a small orange satellite vaulting a continuous circuit about a small planet blue in cast. On the planet, an exertive self-booer takes a look around himself and finds only an island which appears to be crusty and twilit all throughout. Presently we find his temper being of the ill variety. These same tensions have bulged through his neck before. He looks up at the satellite and beyond it to the starts and wonders if an intelligence category - out there where the magic smoke twirls and whirls - is really all as brassy and powerful as some suppose to believe. After all, don’t they (the intelligence) keep him constantly stumbling around in a smazy enclave of pseudo revelation where creature comforts are so few and far between. How much more dastardly and unimaginative could they be? Are they afraid of their own creation or just don’t care? This is his verdict - that he is the product of the spineless. Well, don’t expect our man to feel in their debt. Don’t expect him to be very grateful for much of anything. Thank-you O patron saints of the mystifying abyss, he damns with faint praise. Often, in fact, he sermonizes them in his roving through the desert, sermons also citing the moon, which he dubs cooky due to it looking to him like a sweet breakfast morsel. He strongly believes she (the moon) derives significant mirth from his situation and swears that if their places were traded he would never see her luxuriate as she does now. In closure, a crow of laughter muffled by the cloth hooding his whole head and face, save the eyes.

His thoughts are always tumbling on like a goulash of smoothing stones and only somewhere, in the back of his mind, is a vague assurance that his scruples for signification, though perhaps quite pathetic, aren’t without advance. Unbeknown to him in all his isolated straining are all the parts of himself resting on retrogressive cushions - but even still, at the press of his camel he cuts an upward trail toward the sweetening pot. So if you stay, prepare to be regaled as you hear it; it is a tale of a passage through twilit scenes, including a camel and a righteous rondure (referring in fact to our jaunty satellite). But no, proper regaling calls for participation, so won’t you step up for a leg up and mount our creature-teacher front-hump and say Li Li Li (your approval) to our ride, knowing full well that, even if the shit will be blown out of you and you tread in the seismic ramifications of your choice, both ends stand at the pleasant? Yes, anyway, you will.

Beeha came back from the water, back from the oasis pool, back from the cool and breezy, onto terra firma sandy, hot, and dry. He squinted his eyes out at the land, regarding a spread of crust interminable to the horizon but a strain away, he would think, and so it was, but each time more of one than ever. Yet over every horizon he would find the same thing: crust and the same demented twilight which had lit his expansive asylum ever since the termination of his job at the mill. Only very recently (out of the puzzling brown) had he come upon this hallowed oasis hammock. He couldn’t even begin to show his gratitude. Literally. He partook meagerly of it, protracting the gourmand in him which made him feel stooged at the want of the delicious, fattening flinders. The crust, it seemed, had set in him and made him a lot like the old sod on which he trod.

Traveled on and on Beeha did, with a steady conversion through the months to the thicker and tougher and the inedibly crispified. He slid over an altitude of grey rock late in the year but saw nothing there of paradisaical rank, really expected nothing ranking such. He was beginning to gain the proverbial heart of pharaoh, and with the heart encased as such, extreme places begin to lack the essential thick red fluid. He was dying and didn’t know what to do about it. Truth was, only the slant-jawed moon, who could be seen grinning like a brainless cunt off the reflective waters of the oases he passed, had a way plotted through the thick hide of hard Beeha. And in some way, indiscernibly, Beeha missed the sight of every cosmo-lamp up in the night flashing their beautiful naked parts in his direction with light old as hell.

Finally one night Beeha spotted an oasis and decided to sacrifice his groove for crucial refreshment. He didn’t even realize in his delirious state how reconditely he had dealt with his body’s effective demand for water. Unhanding the reins, he dismounted the camel and left the wasted animal to re-dampen the wells in its back. He threw his cloak over his shoulder and slid to his knees in front of the water like Viggo Mortensen. Parched as he was, he stretched his arm out gradually, not eager to let the vital wetness sink its well-meaning teeth into him (the same anomalous sensation which on former occasions had made him withdraw his begging shape from the candy gurgles and lumber away on his trusty steed in swaying retreat over the pitchy scab of earth). How to handle the not-slaughterous after the slaughterous is one tricky bit, excruciating in complexity, for the unlucky souls who attend the slaughter in fathomage. The trick, one might judge, would be somehow distilling your own ruminations about death and mortal man (perish: the thought as it were) and therefrom create an approach to life that doesn’t reduce you to a brown smear in the shorts of a society whose patchwork is already stuffed near the anus. Lucky is the man who is able to access his own subtle exam and grade the knotty issues presented there in peace. Beeha, as it was, hadn’t found said graces. He had come used to turmoil.

Well, he lowered his hand into the pool nonetheless, cringing, and brought upwards a cup of it to his lips. But when he inhaled on it, it made him gag exuberantly on his tongue, which lay in his mouth like a withering log. And the next thing his camel’s eyes ogled was a spitting, swearing, ground-tearing Beeha yelling in some kind of great frustration. Actually, Beeha’s neck was craned and he was raging again at the coral moon, at that stupid sweet morsel, as if she had come fresh out of an empyrean fire and was and would be never his breakfast:

“Who are you looking at, cooky? At me - old Beeha? And who is he, I beg? Who am I? I tell you, if you were not so lofty, so high, I would lift up my arm and bash you lowly! Yes, to crumbles, cooky, and scatter your pieces hither and there where neither king’s men nor their horses could fix a picnic nor find the goose to which that golden egg belonged! Know that I would, cooky, and laugh and laugh at you! Forasmuch as you hang there insisting your point, I know you are just a circle, mocking me between the ripples in the spring, the same as you mock me in this instance from your real abode up above. O, it is you I hate! Around the belt we go, over and over, don’t we,” he said, not quite taking his own meaning there at the end and at the same time letting his body slump over into the sand. “Plight.”

But a moment later, in a bout of pure trickery, Beeha watched his camel lower its head to drink again. Then to his complete surprise, the puddle on which his camel slurped had a face of its own. There was an anthropomorphist in the water kissing his mount, giving it life. Suddenly he had an idea. Ripples in a spring. Home above. No. No. No. Your home is here, cooky, and I will get my hands on you! Despite the irrationality of it, despite how he knew what a bitch it would hurt like, he delayed for only one glorious teeth-clenching second longer before he plodded straight into the water, took one look at the moon happily reflected there, and began fisting her over and over, screaming at her, eating her, gnashing her. He forgot himself in the flaming pain that overcame him and just churned.

A while later when all was still and he stood there, waist deep in the murk of his disturbance, heart thumping like crazy, sopping wet and dripping, he looked down at the moon, still smirking there like the brainless cunt she was, and for reason beyond his comprehension all was well. And he heard a voice working its way up through him, singing out his pores saying:

As you have been standing change, strange you do not crumble, rip and rumble, your forces grim and grey.

I wonder what is in your pail, tears or ale or old rat tail, and don’t you wish a face so pale as that of mine, the pure divine, the one to which the wolves do whine?

O little gremlin with ragged patten
Don’t get mad at me and spit
I’ll spank you with my rhyming wit
And say it all was fiction

But I’ll make it fair and make it quick, make partial crust of earth to spit, and take no more the daily hit, grime and grit, I’ll rinse it all away!

Thusly was his steely person transmogrified.

In this manner it came to pass that never after that soggy cooky, whether he ever stood at the white beaches to face the sea or not, did the wind in the swarthy places impel the sand to bake Beeha so completely with its particles of death and life.

There. The pot has been sweetened. Now you may hop off our creature-teacher and head back into the mill. Back to the mill with moisture . . . composure . . . circulation